User blog:El Tea Couch/Status Report - Week of 06 October 2014
With the experimental branch updates on 0.50 rolling out this week, Raist and Eugen have worked together to deploy additional data tracking methods that should aid fine tracking and design adjustment related to player movement. Previously the team had focused most of our data tracking methods on loot distribution, spawning, and so forth - as we move closer towards the deployment of vehicles, expansion of existing persistent objects, and the central loot economy we will continue to use experimental branch and official stable branch servers to guide the design of gameplay mechanics via player movement, death, and camp analysis. The above image shows the concentration of player deaths within a 12 hour period on one Experimental Branch 0.50 server. As you can see, the expected large amount of player deaths occur along the player spawn points. However, what is increasingly fascinating is the large spread of unique player deaths across the map. From as far out as Kamenka, to Tulga, Skalisty Island, and Devil’s Castle. I like to imagine the lone player death at Green Mountain was an epic last stand gun fight, but we may never know. In addition to the obvious value to the data above, analyzing data like this will become increasingly valuable for the development of core gameplay systems, as well as Chernarus Plus over the coming days and months. In addition to the work done on player data tracking, the gameplay programming team has worked hard on increasing server side performance optimization as well as server side security updates related to player position tracking. 0.49 introduced a good deal of server side performance enhancements, and addressed quite a few critical issues with stability. However, with these fixes came several new issues that we hope to see resolved with the stable release at the end of the month. We hope to finish out October with 50 player servers, persistence enabled by standard, and faster server performance across all servers on stable branch. As we progress along our goals in October, the status reports will keep the player base updated on these goals and any potential blockers or delays.''- Brian Hicks / Producer'' Chris / Lead Artist “'Tech:' Work continues on fixing the graphical bug associated with our 3D camo and it has turned out to be more troublesome than originally thought. While the programmers were tinkering around with the shaders in search of a fix, we were able to have an additional channel added to the shader used for most of the loot items which will allow us to procedurally change the color of objects via config. The designers will evaluate how and when to implement such a feature but I am hopeful it will lead to a lot more color customization options on a lot more items than we currently allow. We also got support for a colorize in the grass shader so that we can vary the color of patches of grass in a large field, adding some visual flare to the environment. Character Art: The first women’s clothing item is done: 3/4 length pants. It will be added in the no-so distant future, along with women’s shorts and a sweater. The prison uniform, which was paused pending a few high priority tasks, is WIP again. We will have to pause the creation of new zombie types temporarily to work on some tweaks to the skeleton, which were asked for by the programming and animation team, related to new zombie AI/animation triggers. The team in Bratislava is working on various crafted items from leather which I hope will be interesting to people who like to play in more of a PvE style. Weapons: The Derringer art is ready and will soon be ready to be passed along the chain: animations, sound, cfg. The AKS74U and AK74M are being polished along with the art assets related to 5.45mm ammo. I have set this as a goal for myself - that by the end of October the AK74 family will debut on experimental. “ Viktor / Lead Animator "After introducing one handed pistol animations many visual bugs had to be fixed to provide smooth and polished experience. Part of that is polishing and replacing some unarmed moves while standing. First of upcoming minor changes is a new unarmed sprint and unarmed run should follow. When we finalize those we can polish other animations like running with binoculars, pistols and other one handed items. We are still processing the last mocap animations as these should be ready for improved zombie ai. Many new attack for zombies are being created so we can prototype and test different zombie combat situations. We already have a first iteration of tools for new animation system and it looks great. If all goes as planned we would like to introduce zombies on the new system as soon as it will be possible. After all, we already have a deer running around using new system (just internally for now) and it’s already visible improvement. But it is still a long way to go until we can use all of the great features of the new animation system.” Peter / Lead Designer "Last week was pretty hectic. We brought a bunch of different assets from our backlog to the game like the leather sewing kit so you can finally repair your leather clothes and shoes, RDG2 tube also known as smoke grenade, sardines - this time alive not canned, welding and firefighter helmet to cover your head, brass knuckles and sledgehammer to crunch some bones. All of these things should spawn in game along with long time awaited MP-133 and R92. As well, a good amount of bug fixing tasks were addressed. For example better placement of tents which takes surrounding collisions into account to allow for more intelligent pitching of tents in wild places. Proper placement of wrecks created by dynamic events. Allowing or forbidding of fireplaces to be ignited in some places. Temperature and wetness fixes and tweaks. Apart from that we also opened discussion which will help us to outline construction design and it’s mechanics. We are analyzing what’s possible and where the borders are so we can decide upon crucial things like how they will be placed - freely or grid based? What the granularity of objects will be - down to logs, whole walls or perhaps complete floors? How the crafting of these objects will be done - just a recipe or actually stacking. There are many important things which will define player experience of creating, using and ambushing bases. Interesting times ahead, probably we will need some dungarees in the future… see you in Chernarus folks! “ Standup Notes for the week of 06 October 2014 (Note: Standup notes are not a change log - they are a quick high level look at tasks the teams worked on throughout this week) Art *Multiple crafted leather items *Women’s shorts, sweater. *Procedural color changing for loot. *Polishing bush rag and 3D camo for weapons *Plants for horticulture *Craftable vest and coat *Various car parts *Prison Uniform *Steyr AUG *Zombie skeleton tweaks *Large military tent Animation *Player Unarmed Sprint *Player animation graph bugfixing *Zombie mocap processing *Lowered one handed Pistol Animations Polishing *Zombie Animations *Player Pistol Animations Design *Bugfixing *Configs and scripts for new items (lockpicks, rangefinder) *Configs and scripts for hermit zombie *Configs and scripts for MP133, Repeater *Weather impact on player and carried items *Vehicles and their parts *Horticulture *Barricading *Animal and zombie AI *Advanced melee combat string table Programming *Critical inventory fixes *Unintenional weapon switching *Issues with animation sychronization *Server performance issues *Broken door states in navmesh *Improved persistance saving *Server performance issues *Data/Common Stats tracking *Loot distribution analysis References http://dayzdev.tumblr.com/post/99569412416/with-the-experimental-branch-updates-on-0-50 [[User:El Tea Couch|''El Tea Couch]] [[User talk:El Tea Couch|Talk'']] 22:37, October 9, 2014 (UTC) Category:Blog posts